jaibot comments on Using Evolution for Marriage or Sex - Less Wrong

17 Post author: diegocaleiro 06 May 2013 05:34AM

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Tags: short-term mating long-term marriage sex. advice intelligence evolution

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Comment author: jaibot 06 May 2013 05:16:50PM *  6 points [-]

When I say "A guy does D when G happens" please read: "There are statistically significant, or theoretically significant reasons from social endocrinology, or social and evolutionary psychology to believe that under circumstances broadly similar to G, human males, on average, will be inclined towards behaving in manners broadly similar to the D way. Also, most tests are made with western human males, tests are less than 40 years old, subject to publication bias, and sometimes done by people who don't understand math well enough to do their statistics homework, they have not been replicated several times, and they are less homogenous than physics, because psychology is more complex than physics."

Could we get this in giant, neon bold blinking text for all conversations of this genre?

Comment author: ChristianKl 07 May 2013 05:20:44PM 1 point [-]

Quite often proponents of evoluationary psychology give advice that doesn't make sense if you don't think that the findings of evoluationary psychology generalize to a large percentage of the human population and only say something about averages.

If you want to use information to guide your actions it's important to have a grasp on the likilhood that you can generalize from a certain evoluationary psychology claim to a situation in your daily life.

The proponent of evoluationary psychology usually thinks that you can generalize the finding of evoluationary psychology to daily life in a way that increases your understanding of those situations.

Comment author: jaibot 07 May 2013 05:57:25PM 0 points [-]

It may be possible to glean individually-useful information from evolutionary psychology, with a pile of statistical uncertainty. I'm not sure, and not aware of that much in the way of rigorous investigation in applications of applied psychology.

It becomes a problem when both speaker and audience don't have a grasp on the statistics, and it degrades into a horrible pile of confirmation bias and echo chambers and tribal fealty. I expect lesswrong to handle this better than most places, though what I've seen so far is...less than perfect.

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